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Posts Tagged ‘esxi’

This is definitely an edge case, but if you’ve got a bunch of old 3Ware 9650SE RAID cards laying around, they will work in ESXi 5.5. You’ll need to either create a custom ISO or add them via SSH after the install. Adding them post-install is easier for me than making another custom ISO.

I’ve set up 2 ESXi servers (old x58 chipset MBs I had laying around) to do some clustering. I picked up 5 9650SE RAID cards off of eBay for $55, including cables, and cobbled together some RAID volumes from the stacks of HDDs I had laying around.

I set up my ESXi boxes with a custom ISO I’d created previously that has the Realtec NIC, Intel NIC, and Intel SATA drivers (that’s another post, or look up ESXi-customizer). I was able to get the cards up and working with minimal issues (after I updated the firmware to the most current version…was a puzzle as a couple cards were updated and just worked, then I got stuck with some others and they wouldn’t work at all until the FW was updated)

I then replaced one of the ESXi boxes with an x79 system and could not get the RAID card to work with the existing drivers I had. Hours and multiple reboots, driver uploads, I found another driver that works from Avago (direct): http://docs.avagotech.com/docs/12349232

Veeam is offering an NFR license for MVP/MCP/MCTS:

If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) or a Most Valuable Professional (MVP), you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.

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*An NFR (Not for Resale) license can only be used for evaluation or demonstration purposes. Read EULA for more details.

Running a Hyper-V VM while Hyper-V is itself a VM under ESXi5 does work, it’s not really something you’d want to do, unless you’re masochistic. I was able to get Windows 2000 Pro running walking as a VM successfully. The stability of ESXi seems to be greatly affected by doing this also, since my ESXi host hung at some point overnight.

I was excited to try out the new free version of ESXi 5 today on a test system with a Core 2 Quad Q6600.

I received an ominous message that “VMWare ESXi 5.0 installs on most systems but only systems on VMWare’s compatibility Guide are supported.” I didn’t think much of it until I got to the next stage of the install and got this message:

“Error(s) <CPU_CORES ERROR: This host has [1] cpu core(s) which is less than recommended [2] cpu cores>”